TechSoup’s Digital Storytelling Challenge
offers a chance for your photos and videos to win cool prizes for your
organization, ranging from a Flip video camera to Adobe software. This
contest is wide open to all — submissions are welcomed from the community at
large, nonprofits, individuals, libraries, and organizations both in
the US and elsewhere in the world — but your entries do need to be in by Friday, October 16th.
Even if you’re not 100% sure you can pull it off by the deadline,
it’s still well worth taking a look at the contest for the digital
storytelling ideas and tools it might suggest to you.
Social benefit organizations are challenged to tell their organization’s story by submitting one of the following:
You do not need to enter all three. Only one format is required
for the challenge, although you are welcome to submit more than one
format.
Goldmail is software you download and install on your own
computer. It lets you make slides “from virtually any content
(including PowerPoint slides, PDFs, Text documents, and photos),”
record your voice over them, then send a link to your message by email
or post it online to share. (See the Goldmail gallery
for ideas. There’s a free 30-day trial if you’d like to enter the
Digital Storytelling Challenge in the Goldmail category, or simply to
check out the software for other uses by your organization.)
YouTube is the second-largest US “search engine,” according
to most Internet traffic reports, so, if
your organization doesn’t yet have a YouTube channel, you’ll probably want to be there sooner rather than later — why not give it a shot for the Techsoup challenge? (We’ll be talking
more in the next few weeks about YouTube and other video-sharing
services, by the way, and how nonprofits can take advantage of the growing popularity of video without a big tech budget.)
But if you’re not quite up to making a short video, yet — no problem. The Flickr 5-picture story format is achievable even for the
smallest nonprofit with limited equipment, tech skills, and staff or
volunteer time. The challenge here is less about your access to
technology and more about your ability to craft a compelling message
from images — to tell your story in just 5 photographs! (And down the line, who knows? You might even use your photo story as a "storyboard" for planning a short video on the same topic!)
For detailed information on the Digital Storytelling Challenge process, judging panel, and prizes, as well as some helpful resources to help you learn to tell a strong visual story and share it online, visit http://www.techsoup.org/community/online-events/tsdigs/challenge/.
If your nonprofit takes up this Challenge, please leave a comment below and share the story!